The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-04-23

List of resolutions:

Resolution No. 1: Change the PR from 'deprecated' to 'should' and then merge

View the transcript

1.1. CSS files encoding

See github issue #1628.

See github pull request #1645.

Dave Cramer: first, encoding of CSS files
… we say CSS files must be encoded in UTF8 or UTF16
… web is leaning towards UTF8 for everything
… i18n WG suggests we use UTF8 for everything
… but some existing epubs might already use UTF16
… proposal would deprecate UTF16 CSS files
… issue is the epubcheck would be obligated to display warning if it found UTF16 CSS
… not sure how big of a thing this is
… CSS WG has recommended UTF16 in past
… i'm okay with deprecating UTF16
… the proposed phrasing is in the issue

Ivan Herman: not sure how much books currently use UTF16, but epubcheck having to warn about this means that some changes will have to be made to epubcheck
… but this isn't too big an obstacle
… there is already a PR
… ready to go
… it keeps the current sentence but adds "but UTF16 is deprecated"
… also, the exact same thing is happening in the spec for XML char encoding
… so the PR makes the conforming change to XML too

Matt Garrish: i'm not sure how much epubcheck even looks at CSS
… we've talked about deprecating UTF16 before, but we opted to keep it at the time for backwards compatibility reasons

Brady Duga: are there enough positive benefits to go ahead with this?
… also, deprecation feels like it should be a statement of intent (i.e. that we will remove in future), but the truth is that we intend to keep this compatibility forever

Dave Cramer: we're trying to work with i18n WG

Brady Duga: is it deprecated in CSS?

Dave Cramer: they say you SHOULD use UTF8

Brady Duga: i would say "you should use UTF8", but i'm not sure about deprecating UTF16

Ivan Herman: i suspect there are tools and scripts which simply do not work with UTF16
… so we minimize the chance of people trying to use UTF16 CSS epubs with these tools

Brady Duga: i'd be surprised if there are a lot of tools out there that don't support both encodings

Matt Garrish: we are trying to align with the web, and what the other specs are saying
… i.e. guiding people towards only using UTF8

Dave Cramer: i understand the concerns with deprecation
… we could say CSS must be either UTF8 or UTF16, but it should be UTF8

Matt Garrish: that puts us more or less back in the same place, there's going to be an epubcheck warning

Dave Cramer: and then people also have to go look up the definition of "deprecated", so maybe not saying that is more straightforward

Ivan Herman: for sake of argument, Rust for example, which is gaining popularity, only uses UTF8

Proposed resolution: Change the PR from 'deprecated' to 'should' and then merge (Ivan Herman)

Charles LaPierre: Brackets is also only UTF8, complains it can't read UTF16 files.

Ivan Herman: but yes, let's change the PR

Matt Garrish: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Ivan Herman: +1

Charles LaPierre: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Dave Cramer: +1

Deborah Kaplan: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: 0

Brady Duga: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Gregorio Pellegrino: 0

Resolution #1: Change the PR from 'deprecated' to 'should' and then merge

Encoding of CSS files #1628

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